SES: Nabokov himself,
in alluding to his character in "On a Book Entitled Lolita" or in interviews,
almost always calls her Lolita... Nevertheless, in the novel itself, I find a
difference between Humbert's pet name and her other names. I also find it
ironic--and yet completely understandable--that Humbert's name for her is the
one that is commonly used.
MR: For me, Jansy's notion of absence-as-presence [ the reader doesn't need to "know or to guess who the actual
(fictional) Dolores Haze might be" because her "absence" is, by itself, an
extremely effective literary instrument...] seems most akin to my
experience of the book... When I mentioned accessing Lo's subjectivity, I
was asking myself, can I think as Dolores thinks?... I do not, however, feel
like I can get inside Dolores's mind to anywhere near the extent that I can
enter HH's.
JM:
(a) Wallace Stevens ( "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon") wrote: "I was the
world in which I walked, and what I saw/ or heard or felt came not but from
myself;" In the same spirit, VN's characters and
worlds may be seen as extensions or derivations
from a constructed "I" ( like in Stevens) - an "I" that is
commonly associated to the name "Vladimir Nabokov" - and who
may acquire an "independent life" ("Lolita is famous, not
I,'' Nabokov once said about his nymphet and novel.)
Although I can see what Matt means by
"subjectivity", like him I also find myself unable to "get inside
Dolores' mind", perhaps because as a reader I became a figment
among other figments. And yet it is as figments that we are
able to reach out and feel empathy for any
other Dolores or Lolita - "out there", through the mirror.
Edgar Allan Poe's narrators ( in "The Fall of the House of Usher,"
for example), guide the reader's emotions by minute descriptions of
their own moods, thoughts, moral judgements or
their responses to closed spaces and foggy
environment. Whenever any Nabokov-narrator writes a confession or
suggests thoughts and moods, like Poe's, isn't it then that VN
is (rather sensibly) at his most "unreliable"?
(b) Advised by A.Bouazza to look into
ADA for other instances of the word "ceil" [ PF: "when he
fell ill and soon expired under his splendid painted bed ceil
with its reproductions of Altamira animals..."] Ifound
these excerpts to share:
1. " ‘— the nuance of willows, and counting the little sheep on her
ciel de lit which Fowlie turns into "the sky’s bed"
instead of "bed ceiler." ;
2.
Thus seen from above, as if reflected in the ciel
mirror that Eric had naively thought up in his Cyprian
dreams..." (ceil and its variant ciel )
3. My first recollection goes back to mid-July, 1870, i.e., my
seventh month of life (with most people, of course, retentive consciousness
starts somewhat later, at three or four years of age) when, one morning, in our
Riviera villa, a chunk of green plaster ornament, dislodged from the
ceiling by an earthquake, crashed into my cradle. The 195 days
preceding that event being indistinguishable from infinite unconsciousness, are
not to be included in perceptual time, so that, insofar as my mind and my pride
of mind are concerned, I am today (mid-July, 1922) quite exactly fifty-two,
et trêve de mon style plafond peint.
I
was surprised by the quantity of cave aurochs, plaster
plafonds, ceil-ceiling paintings, panoplies and such found in VN.
The closing lines in ADA, too, are revealing: Not the least adornment of
the chronicle is the delicacy of pictorial detail: a latticed gallery; a
painted ceiling; a pretty plaything stranded among the forget-me-nots
of a brook; butterflies and butterfly orchids in the margin of the romance;.[..]
and much, much more...